Question 7

by Richard Flanagan

Little Boy is generally accepted to have exploded with a force equivalent to 15,000 tons of TNT. However, a major postwar US government report, the Strategic Bombing Survey, analysing the effect of aerial bombing in the Second World War, estimated that the same blast and fire effect of the Little Boy explosion could have been achieved with 2,100 tons of conventional bombs. In other words, the bombing of Vietnam can be calculated as the equivalent of either 500 Hiroshima bombs (at 15,000 tons) or, using the Strategic Bombing Survey figures, the equivalent of 3,571 Hiroshima bombs (at 2,100 tons). It is impossible to accurately quantify in a war that saw more than three million die, of whom two million were civilians, how many died from aerial bombing. We remember Hiroshima. Who, other than the Vietnamese, remembers the Vietnamese dead? Other than the Cambodians, the Cambodian dead? The Laotians, the Laotian dead?